Strange Shadows
by Aenigmatic
Summary: A chance meeting brought them together. Now, a closely kept secret threatens to pull apart this new, fragile relationship. The perilous journey ahead of them has just begun. A very AU exploration of 'Beneath the Surface'. S/J centric.
1. Prologue

**Strange shadows**

**Summary**: A chance meeting brought them together. Now, a closely kept secret threatens to pull apart this new, fragile relationship. The perilous journey ahead of them has just begun. A very AU exploration of 'Beneath the Surface'. S/J centric.

**Rated**: T, M in later chapters

**Disclaimer**: Some dialogue appropriated from the show to fit the plot. No copyright infringement intended.

**Author's note**: This grew out of quite a simple question: what if Jonah and Thera were considered too valuable to be slave workers in the mine and led actual, 'normal' lives on P3R-118? My characterisation of the both of them is deliberately different in the beginning as we start far, far out in an AU; it's also an extrapolation of how the mind wipe would have altered their life histories and to a lesser extent, certain aspects of their personalities. Without the constraining context of the military and the Stargate program, I imagine Carter and O'Neill would behave rather differently with each other. By the time the story spins back to the SGC towards the end, we'll get the O'Neill and Carter that we're familiar with.

My thanks to Lucycat from GW who was the originator of this particular idea. I just took it, watered it and wrote it. This is still very much a work in progress, but I definitely understand how frustrating it can be if updates don't come and all I can do is ask for your patience.

_"__They see only their own shadows or the shadows of one another…" – Plato, The Allegory of the Cave_

* * *

**Prologue**

A thousand voices spoke at once. They whispered into her ear, hissing jargon that she couldn't understand. Then came the breathless whirl of images, a terrifying visual assault that made her wheel across scenes as quickly as the pages of a book could be flipped. Abruptly, they froze and faded into nothingness, leaving a throbbing pain and a painfully racing heartbeat that took a while to subside.

Out of the chaos, a small, low-pitched voice insistently said her name.

Reflexively, her hands closed into tight fists as she fought the rising tide of nausea that has taken up residence in the pit of her stomach.

The voice has stopped. Frantically, she searched for her lifeline, swimming out of the darkness, kicking with a force that brought the pain back. Wincing, she opened her eyes, then shut them immediately against the brightness, catching the faint words issued from the mouth of a smiling man dressed in white, black and dark red.

"Do you hear me?"

It was a struggle to work a dry, parched throat. "Yes."

A straw was placed at her lips and she sucked at it gratefully, feeling the cool rush of a sweet liquid down her throat.

"Now, can you see me?"

"Yes." Her voice came out more clearly this time.

This was the part that she liked the most. They were familiar questions that she allowed herself to answer on autopilot, asked in a monotone that acted like a soothing balm to the blinding pain in her head a few seconds ago.

"Open your eyes."

She obeyed wordlessly, lifting her lids fractionally against the piercing light, then slowly retracted them until everything swam into sight as a blurry mass of whites, blacks and reds.

"Tell me what you see in front of you."

She exhaled sharply, waiting until her sharpening vision brought her surroundings into greater clarity. "I see you."

"Good," the voice replied affably. "Tell me what you see around you."

"Lights. Quiet. Chair. Calm. Soothing-" With no trace of hesitation in her speech, she continued her fragmented litany, giving the man who faced her a monosyllabic description of what she felt in no particular order, repeating the words that she had repeated at least a hundred times.

He was putting her through her paces. It was routine conditioning, a framework of known variables arranged in a fashion that was easy enough to follow, a prescribed list of instructions that she instinctively gravitated towards. There was some comfort in its unchanging nature.

A short period of silence fell after she exhausted her long list of words.

"You are showing marked improvement," he said and paused, peering straight into her eyes, the weight of his approval evident in his voice.

Inordinately pleased with her progress, she smiled tentatively in response. "It's good to hear that."

"Now tell me about your past."

She took a deep breath and began. "I lost my parents a decade ago. They died in what the military called a tragic accident. I studied at the Institute of Science. I was a prodigy whom the Administration noticed."

"Tell me more."

She dug deep, obeying the soft command, forcing herself through the thick morass that was a wasteland of ruined memories, sifting through the haze and the ash in a fruitless search for a gem of clarity.

Yet none came.

As though from a distance, the machines whirred and clicked in time with her roiling thoughts and emotions, giving inadequate expression to the mental tangle in which she found herself. Reluctantly, she pulled herself back and opened her eyes, frustration turning her voice into a raspy whisper. "I don't know anymore."

"Try again."

Sucking in a quick breath, she dove in again…only to come up short with an insurmountable block that hadn't been there before. Panic clawed at her arms, forcing its fingers into her heart, ready to rip it open. A scream rose and died in her throat, stopped only by the heavy weight of a hand over her bare arms.

It was her only lifeline in an anchorless sea of blank solitude.

"I'm sorry," she cried out, blinking away the moisture that pooled hot and traitorous at the corner of her eyes. "Please. I can't!"

His voice was a low monotone, containing no judgement. "It is alright."

But it wasn't, was it? More upset at herself than anything, she snapped her eyes open, needing seeing for herself that there was no trace of disappointment in the man's face simply because she hadn't been able to remember what had apparently been taught to her a few times before.

The man stood, apparently satisfied with her reply and twisted a few knobs on the topmost machines next to him, sending a low pulse that went straight under her skin, veining out from her chest, to her neck and finally to the back of her head, like the rapid downward flow of a river's tributaries over a steep embankment. She tensed as her muscles contracted, awaiting the splitting headache that was to follow – as routine dictated. Her eyes fell closed involuntarily, shutting out the machines' blinking lights as their hum intensified-

Instead, all that she saw was a slow montage of images that told a story of a city in pain. Crumbling ruins, washed out faces and screaming children – loss personified in senseless destruction. But pain was also personal….she saw her face in the faces of the children who mourned their dying parents, in those who died, in the populace who lost their trust in the government and its military. She saw herself working, churning out reports and calculations in the constant strive to prove her intellect as big as they had said it was, the endless nights of working for a purpose.

Instinctively, she reached out, as though the physicality of that action could capture the intangibility of a moment, then drew it back when the image flicked past her consciousness. Faster and faster, these fragments coalesced into a single image…of a blond woman with blue eyes, who stood tall and steady with her feet firmly planted on the ground.

The disquieting images in her mind faded to blackness.

She jerked hard in her seat, opening her eyes to take in the familiar room and the man who stood opposite her with his fingers poised over the machines' dials. A quick glance down told her that she was restrained. As was the usual practice. The long time that she had spent in this chair has taught her well that struggling would get her nowhere and simply brought about more pain.

The visual invasion was exhausting. But they helped her to remember what she'd forgotten and perhaps, that was all that really mattered. Everything had transpired to bring her to this very point – a place that was infinitely better than where she'd been previously.

"Do you remember now?"

"Yes."

"Good. Now tell me your name."

"I am Thera Arann."


	2. Chapter 1 - In a day's work

_A/N: Thanks for being patient! I'll be away for a couple of weeks following this update, so hopefully this longer chapter will tide you over till then. _

* * *

**Chapter 1 - In a day's work**

_Several months later_

"The byway is clear. No sign of hostile forces."

He ignored the voice in his communication link device, more interested in what had caught his attention.

The small, dark spot that marred the ground was a dead giveaway. Slowly, he crouched and swiped a finger down across the tiny, unsightly blot. He brought his stained digit up to his nose, giving it a short, hard sniff.

Tangy. Metallic. Pungent. The result of a corrosive action of skin oils with iron.

He noted that the blood was fresh, spilled mostly likely because of a superficial wound, judging from the small amount that had dripped on the hard concrete. So there was still a chance that they could be found alive, but he wouldn't count on it.

Not with these people who had taken them.

Then he stood up and carefully shouldered his blast rifle, readjusting its strap, relishing its comforting weight across his chest and back.

"Silver, do you read?"

Adjusting the wireless link in his ear, he finally replied. "Copy, Cuinn."

"Initial sightings say that the PPA are attempting to cross the south end of the Telzarin traverse."

Silver frowned, looking at his lightly-stained finger, then up at the artificial light that filtered through the massive, spherical shield in the atmosphere. The precarious, feared Telzarin traverse lay far beyond the reaches of the protective dome, a notorious, glacial junkyard of spiked rock formation and violent volcanic activity that stretched a hundred miles to the west, the end of which was a vertiginous thousand-foot drop into a roiling sea so acidic it peeled off a man's skin within seconds.

But it was also a distance too great to bridge in three hours, despite the rumours that had been filtering through the Administration about the Planet Protection Agency's strengthening military capability.

Silver tilted his head slightly and considered the reliability of the intelligence report. He was willing to bet that it was simply a decoy, a piece of information that had been hung out like tantalising morsels for the sole purpose of creating rabbit trails.

The blood that was on his finger however, screamed a different story. A quick, mental calculation of distance and time helped confirm his suspicions.

"I've my doubts about that, Cuinn," he said after a while. "We're moving out, but only midway down the Gaszril pass to the Stenn gap. They couldn't have gotten that far and there's enough evidence here that they left the city through the weakest point of the shield. Exactly where we're standing."

"Silver-"

"The Gaszril pass is the only road to the research institute and the fastest way to the Telzarin traverse," he interjected.

Beyond the city's transparent energy dome, the winds were picking up. The freak change in weather merely affirmed his earlier assessment. Those bastards couldn't have gone _too_ far. Visibility was next to nothing and frankly, he'd be the first to admit that he wouldn't be able to see past his own ass out there.

"You'd better be-"

The low frequency whine of the stealth transport craft prematurely ended the conversation. A black mass took shape as it approached the landing platform, emitting a series of counter electrical pulses that temporarily dissolved a portion of the dome's energy shield.

Silver couldn't help the shiver than went down his back when the comfortable climate-controlled temperatures plunged rapidly as the craft's landing ramp lowered with a sharp, hissing sound.

Then he turned and barked to the rest of the team behind him, "Alright boys. I wanna get home in time for dinner. Let's get this over with."

"Weak stomach, huh, Sir?"

"Yeah, you have a problem with that?"

Ignoring their snickers, he waved his men in then followed suit, taking his usual seat near the rear of the transporter.

"Alby," he said, "pull up the contour map of Gaszril."

"On it, Sir."

A chirp from a flat-screen device interrupted the quiet hum of the craft's smooth glide through the winds. A few seconds later, the pilot's voice came through the craft's communication pods.

"Sir, a note from Administrator Calder's security office confirms that it is Meslar Tving claiming responsibility for the hostage situation and the seizure of the Korros shipment."

"Of course it is," Silver muttered, fighting the urge to roll his eyes. Meslar the Twit and the Planetary Protection Asses, as he'd privately renamed them, had been on Calder's most-wanted list for years for their special, extreme brand of environmental protection that has caused endless grief to the security teams in the Neithana's Administration.

It was a messy situation, a damned fray where differing agendas clashed – and clashed violently. At its most basic, the simple truth was that their planet was in trouble. Had been for sometime in fact, ever since a spectacularly botched science experiment nearly a hundred and fifty years ago consequently destabilising the planet's orbital cycle, gradually bringing about a planetary ice age that plunged their world deeper into their winters.

Ironic that the experiment had been conducted with the ultimate aim of eradicating the four seasons on the planet in order to bring about perpetual spring-like conditions.

All of it wouldn't have been possible without a wonder mineral the Administration and their eggheads term the Korros element. Or maybe it was better known as the trump card of politicians who hailed this thing's potential as the next miracle that could save a city in crisis, Silver reflected sourly. In fact, there was too much going for it to leave it where it lay, thanks to the leeway given to the scientists' constant, earnest claims that they had unlocked Korros's true potential.

Until something went wrong, as it often did.

The files that he'd perused on the Korros's development projects prior to the catastrophic disaster over a century ago always led to the same conclusion: a series of botched experiments was always followed by hasty installations of fail-safes; complacency in these safety measures had often led to more reckless, off-the-record experimentation. The risks of a pending large-scale disaster had in essence, been escalating exponentially if anyone had cared to look properly.

They just never did learn.

It was only _another_ reason why Silver disliked eggheads and their penchant for officiously thinking themselves the higher power, only to overwhelmingly prove themselves not.

The most frustrating part of it all was that it seemed as though nothing had changed, even after a hundred and fifty years of living in an icy wasteland of their own making. Only a constructed domed shield after the damned disaster – a desperate joint effort by several departments in the Administration – had saved the population from freezing into extinction.

Life had gone on with a measure of normalcy; in the decades that passed, few really looked up at the sky anymore when all they saw was ambient light.

But even that was failing now. A slowly dwindling supply from rapidly-cooling, overused geothermal hotspots was also taking away the shielding power of the dome, thinning its organic layer and its capabilities to constantly keep out the cold and the unwanted, toxic atmospheric particles. Harnessing new, untapped sources for geothermal heat to provide base-load power was in itself an engineering challenge; toxicity in the atmosphere was slowly making it near impossible for prolonged periods of development. Repeated attempts at trying however, simply produced human-induced seismicity when shifting water levels changed the strain on the rock layers beneath the city and beyond.

In essence, the city simply wasn't operating at a sustainable rate any longer. That much was old news in Neithana.

The research institutes had struggled for options. And they would have continued their stretch of academic fallow had not a scientist been plucked from relative obscurity and thrust into the limelight for her groundbreaking theories and seminal papers on stabilising the core of the very element that had brought their planet to its knees.

Korros was stealing the limelight again, along with this scientist's discoveries, and not in a good way at all.

Silver scowled to himself. He knew as well as anyone did that it had also become a political sticking point; the first who raced to the finish line with a renewable energy source was also guaranteed office.

And that was also when the trouble started in earnest.

News of Thera Arann's early, successful simulations with Korros made its rounds, sending ripples through the Administration and the informers of a once-peaceful organisation that had recently acquired an aggressive, combative edge in their protests against the latest technological breakthrough.

Peaceful protests of tree-huggers had lined the central streets some time back, fearing that toxic cycle of an energy revolution that had nearly put an end to their world could easily do so again. Once upon a time, Silver had thought it cute, hilarious and ultimately useless. But a growing number of supporters sympathetic to the PPA's cause had helped things along a bit too much. It had only taken a short period of time for former tree-huggers to turn into a hostile force that had taken a sizeable chunk out of the Administration's coffers.

In truth, the PPA's seizure of the Korros consignment wasn't unexpected. Mined in dangerous conditions deep underground by hardened criminals who worked out their sentences to keep their planet self-sustaining as they lived out their big freeze, Korros was paid for in blood.

Without its ready availability, work in the scientific lab would stall.

The PPA's rationale was both simple and simplistic: destroy the supply and its transport routes and the city would stay safe from meddling scientists' hands…until the shield failed completely and killed them all, both the good and the bad eggs.

Early on, it was pretty much the lack of foresight on the PPA's part that had irritated Silver more than their efforts at sabotaging the shipment. To him, they were offering nothing but a single-faceted path of violence that emerged out of their fatalistic view of the planet's condition, misguidedly operating on the premise that only aggression demonstrated the supposed higher moral ground they took.

But things were often rarely that simple. If the shield failed, all that was going to be left was a dead civilisation. Were the PPA members simply going to live their lives out in the primitive wilderness under the ice?

The pieces of the puzzle hadn't fitted and ever since he'd returned to duty after a prolonged period of absence, something had just felt wrong.

Not that he was agreeing with what the scientists were doing too but at least that hadn't frequently involved getting their own asses busted.

For a long moment, Silver stared sightlessly at the ground, a hundred thoughts racing through his mind.

The sudden burst of sound from the communication pod stirred him out of his musings.

"Approaching Gaszril. Sir, ready to fastrope in sixty seconds."

He blinked, deliberately blanking his mind of unwanted distractions. Then he gave the order. "Time to go."

Gearing up took a matter of seconds. Silver pulled on his shades, mask and crampons, listening carefully for the short, high-pitched whine of the engine that signalled the retraction of the craft's bottom platform.

As the craft crested the mountain range, a topographic saddle surface and the only continuous route that linked the isolated research institute to the main city came into sight. Framed by the steep cliffs on one side, the Gaszril pass wound several kilometres around the upper reaches of a fast-moving river and opened into a valley where a smaller dome shielded a lone building complex.

Despite the situation, the view from that vantage point still took his breath away.

The cold air rushed up the vent when the craft slowed to a hover at a gap road, allowing five figures to slide noiselessly down the cables and onto the ground where another man was already waiting.

He silently signalled his team into their positions, then crouched next to the man.

"Cuinn."

"Nice to see you too, Silver. Got my team at the rear end of the gap ready and waiting."

"Good."

"You know, I sure hope this plan of yours works out. The big wigs are telling us this large shipment of Korros took nearly a year to mine. If this fails, I'm looking at the mines."

A raised brow was Silver's only response to that comment.

"It'll work. I know this place," he finally said after a minute of silence, raising his binoculars to scan the undulating surfaces of the mountain pass. The familiar ridges and drops came into view, blanketed in a flurry of white. A small movement from around the angular side of the cliff stayed his hand. "I see 'em. Hostiles approaching in a convoy of six armoured vehicles from the west. Entering the kill zone in five seconds."

Cuinn didn't hesitate, signalling his own waiting team.

Silver took a slow, even breath. "On my ma-"

The sonic boom that echoed through the valleys was first felt then seen. It sent a rippling wave of energy that scoured their faces before a thunderous ball of flame and black smoke briefly lit the sky orange and tossed a million tons of snow into the gap, blocking the only exit back into the city. From a distance, he heard the detonating claps of their explosive devices and arms fire, the sounds of an efficient, short-lived skirmish replaced quickly by the unending howls of the winds.

His second's voice came through a few minutes later through their wireless link. "All clear, Sir. Keir is checking for the shipment."

Silver nodded and frowned, suddenly recognising an unpleasant tingling in his gut that was refusing to go away. "Keep me apprised."

Keir's sudden alert held a note of panic. "The shipment's not here!"

The vague sensation of unease crystallised into a terrifying moment of realisation.

Something was wrong.

The destruction of the armoured vehicles and their occupants had happened all too quickly, too easily. The absence of the Korros shipment only pointed to one thing: the hunter had become the hunted.

Silver caught a warning flicker before it happened. In that frozen second, he saw the rocket-propelled projectile fly across the pass from a higher elevation and bury itself in the snow-capped peak in a burst of superheated rock and melting ice. To the left and up a ridge, four silhouetted forms appeared. Whipping his head around to the right, he saw another four.

There were more, he knew, encircling, closing in the ranks. They'd inserted themselves in the narrow gaps of rock, emerging only when the first wave of attack began.

It meant that he and his team were surrounded on all sides.

_C'mon, think!_ _Focus!_

Silver willed the rising panic away, directing his thoughts only to their options.

Then the crazy-assed plan came to him. The only way to get out of this was to expand their operation. The sudden picture of a circle within a circle flashed briefly through his mind, a desperate, counteroffensive tactic he'd only ever read about and never employed.

But it was the only plan that had a chance of working.

A rush of adrenaline unfroze his limbs as he tried working his dry mouth into a semblance of a yell.

Banking solely on his recollection of the landscape, Silver made a quick decision, yanking out the rope and his artificial anchors from his kit and hoped he wasn't going to send them all to their early graves.

"Cuinn, set up a rappel system."

Then he barked his orders into the link to the teams. "Back off! Head for the caves. Get past the Gaszril and Foxpoint grid, past the gap's sharp drop and out behind the hostiles."

Even as he spoke, he knew that their wireless links weren't going to function that deep underground. But he hoped that his damned team at least guessed what he was trying to do from the hasty set of instructions he'd just dropped.

The click of the belay device snapping into place reached his ears.

Cuinn was already holding out the harness. "I'll be just behind you. Now go!"

Without hesitating, Silver kicked off the cliff and launched himself into vertical space, sliding down the rope as fast as he dared and brought himself nearly a quarter way down the five hundred foot descent. Jamming his foot into a deep crevasse, he risked a glance upwards and saw Cuinn matching his speed and distance.

Time and distance contracted to a small point on the cliff face as each excruciating metre down seemed long and drawn out.

A sudden wind surge slammed him against the sharp rock, its high-pitched howl muffling his shout of pain. Silver fought to regain control, his knuckles turning white with the effort of steadying his body weight and anchoring his feet to the cliff face. Somewhere above him, he heard the faint sounds of Cuinn's own struggle with his rope balance.

The cross-directional gusts died down after what seemed like an eternity. Then he moved, the adrenaline coursing through his body giving him the impetus to finish the last fifty-foot stretch. Finally, he swung himself into a small, jagged opening in the rock, feeling his knees buckling beneath him at the unfamiliar feel of solid ground again.

Cuinn lowered himself into the cave a few seconds later, immediately pulling on the tag line to retrieve the rope. His smile was wobbly but relieved. "That was close."

Silver followed suit, sparing a quick look at the man beside him. "Go on, say it."

"You are one-"

"Crazy son-of-a-bitch?" He interrupted with a toothy grin, only to find Cuinn looking at him oddly. "What? It's just an expression, isn't it?"

Cuinn shook his head. "I swear, no one invents as many words as you do, Silver. But I'll say now, without that stunt of yours, we'd be dead."

Silver efficiently tucked away the ropes and anchors, then hefted his weapon. Not for the first time, he wondered if their teams were still alive and kicking. "Come on, let's go."

If the stretch down the mountain had been dangerous, nothing compared to the perils of the caves that were cut deep into the unforgiving planes of the north faces of the cliffs. Snow predators roamed the larger openings, their thick hides only penetrable by special spiked bullets that neither of them carried this time around.

So if they survived the next thirty minutes, they'd be in the clear.

They trudged through the cave as quickly as they could, crawling through certain narrow portions until they reached a large cavern lit by a beam of light that filtered through a small opening.

The increase of static in their wireless links indicated that the surface was near. Suddenly, the voice of his second-in-command broke through as clear as day on a frequency that Cuinn also shared.

"…you copy? I repeat, Silver, Cuinn, do you copy?"

Damn it to hell, Silver thought incredulously, it worked.

"Yeah, we're here."

"Alby, report."

"We assumed that you wanted us to either take cover in the caves or spread over a wider area to close in on the hostiles. After rapping down the cliff face, we searched for a wireless signal immediately."

The relief in Cuinn's voice was evident. "We're nearly out. What's your location?"

"Twenty-seven degrees north and eighteen degrees west. You were right, Sir. We're diagonally behind the hostile troops who are making their way slowly down the valley towards the blockage, presumably to retrieve their vehicles."

Silver nodded once in satisfaction. "We've got them where we want them but you're only going to get one chance at this. Cuinn and I are heading out east. Assume offensive formations. Strike on my cue. We'll be covering you," he instructed tersely.

Under no circumstances would they tolerate any form of negotiation with extremists. Or at least, it was the stand that Calder had made clear to all of Neithana's protection agencies and security officers and Silver knew it well.

"Got it."

"Good." Immediately, he hauled himself up from the cave's exit point and took a long, thorough sweep of their location. Beside him, Cuinn was doing the same.

Enough time had been wasted. Silver exchanged a look with Cuinn and shifted prone onto his stomach, ignoring the cold of the snow on his flesh. Steadying the grip on his blast rifle, he looked unblinkingly into the scope ring and took careful aim.

Then he tightened his finger on the trigger and spoke into his wireless link. "Now."

oOo

It was late into the night before Silver actually stepped foot back into the city.

Weariness made his strides shorter and heavier as he headed for the stairs that led him into the inner core of the thriving metropolis, the administrative centre where buildings shot high into the sky and competed for dazzling views.

So much for dinner, Silver thought wryly. Filthy, sore, bruised and hungry, he suddenly wished he could sneak in some food while they debriefed. He'd be lucky to just get a bath tonight if the post-mission briefings at the security department went as planned.

Truth be told, he was more relieved than triumphant, the short battle having worn him down despite his and Cuinn's teams efficiently dispatching the rebel forces with ease after regaining the element of surprise.

The Gaszril pass had erupted into weapons fire on his command. And then it was over in a matter of minutes when the last rebel standing crumpled to the ground. But the Korros shipment had stayed missing and most likely buried under the ice. Immediate recovery actions were halted when the dark blue hues of the evening chased away the short daylight.

Once again, he allowed himself to feel more than a twinge of regret for the drivers who lost their lives in the skirmish. But not any more than that.

They'd been doing their jobs when the PPA had decided to take them all for a joyride. Just as counter-insurgency and neutralising rebel forces formed a major part of his job description. Every mission carried its risks and the teams had better damn well accept that.

Silver suppressed the urge to sigh. Tomorrow was going to be another long day when recovery actions continued. That meant something like five hours of sleep in his apartment, a quick, readymade meal and a small beverage preferably with the sharp sting of alcohol in it.

Cuinn broke into his brooding with a curious question. "How did you know what to do back there at the pass? The caves were there when we needed them. Somehow, it worked out when I never thought it would. Did they teach you that in service college?"

Silver's shoulders lifted slightly in an imitation of a shrug. "Just a chance I took."

He hadn't meant for the answer to come out so flippantly, especially when he knew that it had been more luck than strategic planning that had miraculously brought them back alive. But Cuinn had raised a good question, one to which he hadn't given any thought until it had been voiced.

He had always known his limits and wasn't afraid to push them beyond what he felt comfortable. While instinct sometimes governed the strategies that he'd employed as a team leader of the counter-insurgency forces, the second group of PPA hostiles in their version of an ambush had been too well-hidden in the numerous inlets of the Gaszril Pass, beyond their visible line of sight for intuition to do its handy work. Even so, predicting their location would ordinarily be next to impossible.

But as skilled a commander he was in the counter-insurgency forces, the quick, daring rappel down the vertical cliff faces and the jaunt through the caves far surpassed the risks a sensible leader would have taken when caught a surprise ambush.

To those who looked, the desperate move appeared to be a deliberate combination of quick-thinking, sound military strategy and a large dose of foolhardiness that saved them all.

Why had he done it? How had he known it would have worked?

The truth was, he didn't. But it was a move so eerily familiar that it couldn't have been possible for him to have merely read about it _once_ without having done it himself.

A stray memory abruptly flashed in his mind, of him dressed in olive and black, holding a black weapon of sorts, not unlike the blast rifle he carried. As quickly as it had come, the wisp of déjà vu flitted off like the curl of smoke dissipating into nothingness.

_What the hell was that? _

Silver shook his head, as though the physical movement would help shake off the sudden gathering of cobwebs.

"Silver?"

Slightly abashed, he looked at Cuinn and shrugged again. Then realising that the other man was still waiting for a reply, he quickly flicked through a number of reasons, each one more implausible than its previous one he could just throw at the man. To admit that he didn't really know how it all came about would do nothing but paint himself as an absent-minded idiot who threw all caution to the wind, based on what a _book_ had supposedly mentioned. Yet he wasn't entirely comfortable with an outright lie to a man whom he trusted.

Maybe the answer lay somewhere as a particular shade of grey. Or perhaps it was simply consequence of having been nightsick a long time ago.

Not that he'd ever mention _that_ humiliating detail.

In the end, Silver opted for an easier but oblique explanation of the prior tactical knowledge that he seemed to have developed overnight.

"The Gaszril pass isn't their stronghold. They aren't familiar with the area enough," Silver tried again and hoped Cuinn picked up enough of the annoyance that had crept into his voice to leave it be.

"Calder will be pleased to hear that you did yet another job well." Cuinn threw his answer over his shoulder and headed to the facilities on the left, presumably to wash-up before the briefing.

Silver stared after him for a long minute, then resumed his walk across the quadrangle, his long strides faltering only when he nearly ran down the man who waited patiently at the steps of the government building.

Inwardly, he sighed and looked up, bypassing the greeting he used when addressing a superior. "Administrator Calder."

A small, enigmatic smile tilted the smaller man's lips in greeting. "Welcome back, Jonah."


End file.
